Personal Life
Kaytranada Is Reaching 100% Last fall, Louis Kevin Celestin found himself in an unbreakably terrible mood. As Kaytranada, he had sold out shows all over the world with his joyful house and disco music, but when it came time to finish up his debut album, 99.9%, the 23-year-old producer was exhausted and lashing out at his family, including his younger brother Louis-Philippe, 21, with whom he still shares a basement bedroom in his Montreal childhood home. Kay would sit up all night working on music, sleep into the afternoon, then spend the day generally inconsolable. “My mom would always say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’” he remembers. “I was hella depressed.” It was the first significant stretch of time Kay had spent at home since he’d started touring three years earlier, in 2012, after his unofficial remix of Janet Jackson’s “If” went viral among SoundCloud’s emerging dance scene. The rework took a song that pretty much everyone on the planet had heard and put it in a contemporary, context-less light, with euphoric percussion and a new spin on Jackson’s vocals that shifted her from foreground to background, so she appeared to whisper seductively at first then shout with command. The song has always been about intense desire, but in Kay’s hands, it practically became desire itself. It was thanks to “If,” and his equally ebullient follow-up remixes of Amerie and Missy Elliott, that, in early 2013, he flew on a plane for the first time since he was a child to play a show in Halifax, and was soon booking shows across Europe. Tour money was good, so Kay dropped out of high school and began helping to support his family, which had immigrated from Haiti to Montreal in 1993, shortly after he was born. His dad has earned money as a taxi driver and real estate agent, and his mother worked in the healthcare industry; they divorced when Kay was 14, and proceeds from his shows were a big help to everyone. But being on the road didn’t always suit him. “I was touring with Ryan Hemsworth, and I’d see him have so much fun,” Kay remembers. “It was depressing for me. I was lonely.” He asked Louis-Philippe, whom he calls his best friend, to drop out, too, and join him on the road to cheer him up, but it didn’t fix things. Part of the problem was that nonstop touring was keeping Kay from working on the album he’d long dreamed of making. In 2014, he signed to XL Recordings, the storied London label that’s been home to M.I.A. and Adele. He wanted to be known as an artist, not just a DJ and remixer, and thought that if he could make a statement with his debut, maybe the world would see him that way. But despite the deal, his managers kept insisting he stay on the road, building momentum instead of hunkering down with his songs. In early 2015, he finally told his agents to stop booking shows. “One day I woke up like, ‘I can’t do this,’” Kay says. “I was like, I’m not that dude.” He went back to Montreal to focus on recording, but even then he wasn’t free: should his goal be experimentation, or, as others were pressuring him, to craft radio hits? At home, his depression only escalated. One day, he got in a fight with his mom and his brother about “stupid shit,” and he ran down to the basement. “I knew what was wrong,” he says. “I knew why I was pissed off out of nowhere.” His older sister, who also lives at home, came down to console him. She found him in tears and started to cry, too. It was then that he told her a truth about himself, the root cause of his turmoil: he was gay. “I just snapped,” he says. “Something inside me was like, ‘Wake the fuck up.’ I felt like there were two people inside me. I was trying to be somebody I was not, and I was frustrated that people didn’t know who I was.” His sister offered to help him find a psychologist, but he declined. Instead, he focused on coming out to his mom and his brother. In truth, he had sort of already told them. At the age of 16, in a fit of self-assertion, he had admitted to both of them that he was bisexual, but had quickly retreated and never spoke about it again. “It was too many emotions at the same time,” Louis-Philippe remembers. “I was like, ‘Oh that’s good,’ and at the same time, I was like, ‘Oh what does mom think?’ We’re Haitians, and Haitians don’t appreciate gay people at all. I thought maybe it was a phase.” And on the outside it may have looked like one: not long after, Kay ended up involved in a long-term relationship with a woman that ended only last year. Finally, in early winter, he told his brother and mother definitively that he was gay. Though his mother, a Catholic, did bring up Bible verses that condemn homosexuality, Kay says both were supportive and told him that they’d always love him no matter what. “I feel better than I ever have, you know?” he says. “I’ve been sad my whole life, but fuck that. I know I have good things ahead. I don’t know honestly if I’m fully, 100 percent happy, but I’m starting to get there.” Kay and his family live 15 miles from the city center, in quiet Saint-Hubert, in a house shaped almost exactly like the Monopoly piece: classically suburban and noticeably compact. There’s not really anywhere to hide. Sitting together in the living room, beside family photos and wooden statues, we can hear his mom milling about upstairs. His dad, who is visiting, keeps yelling excitedly to Kay’s brother in a thick Haitian accent. Kay’s little dog Boris, who he constantly Snapchats, clicks around. “I don’t go out that much because when I’m out, I just think about the dog,” Kay jokes. We’re keeping the lights off, so the room only glows dimly from the neighboring kitchen. Our voices are hushed so as not to disturb the family. Though Kay seems relieved to be finally making his truth known, he still expresses a stilted caution borne of life in the uber-straight world of a tiny suburb of Montreal or a traditional immigrant community. “Growing up with a lot of friends who are making homophobic remarks,” he says. “It’s kind of like, ‘Damn, I don’t want nobody to know that I’m that person.’” Kay has not told his father yet, something he is still slightly unsure of how to handle. As for the rest of the world, he says, he’s treating this interview in part like the rip of a Band-Aid. He’s talking to me so he won’t have to go through the painstaking process of coming out to every single person he knows. He says he guessed I was gay, too, after I mentioned how much I loved Nicki Minaj when we first met. I’m the first gay person he’s ever told about his sexuality, it turns out. He asks me about my own coming out. At first, he’s tentative with the gay label, unsure of what committing to it will mean for his life and his career. “I don’t call myself straight, I don’t call myself gay, it’s just me…” he says quietly, before finally speaking more directly. “But, I guess, I am gay.” He says he hasn’t hooked up with a boy yet, nor has he visited a gay bar, as he doesn’t have any gay friends to go with and, though he recently told most of his straight homies about his sexuality, he feels weird about bringing them along. Using apps to meet guys makes him nervous because of his relative fame. Like so many before him, he is doing all of this blindly, with few people to help guide his path. “I just wanna come clean and shit,” he says. “Just to be less awkward with people. It’s so wack lie. This is another step in my life. I haven’t changed since high school. I’m ready to move on.”